After Engagement

What you do with the results of engagement is just as important as the engagement itself. In order for engagement to meaningfully impact the design, you need to make sure you’ve accurately understood the feedback you received from the community. Using qualitative data analysis methods and confirming your analysis with the community can help ensure the most accurate interpretation/application/synthesis/understanding of engagement results.

Analyze

In order to identify the important themes and patterns from community feedback, you’ll want to conduct some kind of analysis of your data. Typically community engagement results in qualitative data, whether that be in the form of post its, spatial observations, or survey responses. How you analyze this data depends heavily on what kind of data you collect and what you hope to learn from the data.

If you asked open ended questions during engagement, you may have a broad range of qualitative data that you need to categorize. One method for analyzing this kind of data is thematic coding. In thematic coding, you identify themes within your data and code the data based on these themes. Thematic coding can help you convert open ended qualitative data into categorical data.

Pivot tables are a useful tool for summarizing categorical data. You can use pivot tables to compare the number of responses that fall under different categories. Pivot tables can also be useful for disaggregating data.

Disaggregating data is used to identify patterns between the feedback you received and who gave that feedback. This is especially useful when you're working on a project where there are a variety of stakeholders with different perspectives and levels of power. For example, if you are doing a project where you’re asking residents about the construction of new bus stop shelters, it would be important to disaggregate data based on what transportation method respondents rely on. Those who rely solely on public transportation have a different (and more relevant) perspective than those who typically drive personal vehicles.

Share

Sharing back the summarized engagement results is important to ensure transparency and accuracy. You want to be transparent with participants about what information you gathered and where it’s going. Furthermore, sharing the summary of results can provide the community an opportunity to correct you on any misinterpretations of their input. When you share back the summary of engagement, you want to give space for people to comment on the summary and ask questions.

Methods

The following Airtable lists a variety of techniques you might use to analyze or share the results from engagement.